Written by
Roddy Lumsden |
She lies in her well-kept apartment
above the spick and span cathedral
in the heart of the walled city
above Manila Bay and she dreams
of the great, ruined cities of Europe:
Vienna crumbling into the ocean,
Warsaw in a plague of frogs and flies
and London, where all the black men
have learned to talk like white men,
where all the white men have begun
to talk like cartoon characters.
One week left until Christmas
and you can't buy a Scrabble set
in any shop.
The cartoon characters
are warming their three-fingered hands
around a bonfire made of love letters.
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Written by
Eamon Grennan |
Through an accidental crack in the curtain
I can see the eight o'clock light change from
charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things
in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it
as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone,
telling its tale of how hard the night had to be
for any heart caught out in it, just flesh and blood
no match for the mindless chill that's settled in,
a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff
from the tip of Letter Hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze
glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped
on every window, its petrifying breath a cage
in which all the warmth we were is shivering.
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Written by
Rudyard Kipling |
And reports the derelict Mary Pollock still at sea.
SHIPPING NEWS.
I was the staunchest of our fleet
Till the sea rose beneath our feet
Unheralded, in hatred past all measure.
Into his pits he stamped my crew,
Buffeted, blinded, bound and threw,
Bidding me eyeless wait upon his pleasure.
Man made me, and my will
Is to my maker still,
Whom now the currents con, the rollers steer --
Lifting forlorn to spy
Trailed smoke along the sky,
Falling afraid lest any keel come near!
Wrenched as the lips of thirst,
Wried, dried, and split and burst,
Bone-bleached my decks, wind-scoured to the graining;
And jarred at every roll
The gear that was my soul
Answers the anguish of my beams' complaining.
For life that crammed me full,
Gangs of the prying gull
That shriek and scrabble on the riven hatches!
For roar that dumbed the gale,
My hawse-pipes guttering wail,
Sobbing my heart out through the uncounted watches!
Blind in the hot blue ring
Through all my points I swing --
Swing and return to shift the sun anew.
Blind in my well-known sky
I hear the stars go by,
Mocking the prow that cannot hold one true!
White on my wasted path
Wave after wave in wrath
Frets 'gainst his fellow, warring where to send me.
Flung forward, heaved aside,
Witless and dazed I bide
The mercy of the comber that shall end me.
North where the bergs careen,
The spray of seas unseen
Smokes round my head and freezes in the falling;
South where the corals breed,
The footless, floating weed
Folds me and fouls me, strake on strake upcrawling.
I that was clean to run
My race against the sun --
Strength on the deep, am bawd to all disaster --
Whipped forth by night to meet
My sister's careless feet,
And with a kiss betray her to my master!
Man made me, and my will
Is to my maker still --
To him and his, our peoples at their pier:
Lifting in hope to spy
Trailed smoke along the sky,
Falling afraid lest any keel come near!
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Written by
Emily Dickinson |
Where bells no more affright the morn --
Where scrabble never comes --
Where very nimble Gentlemen
Are forced to keep their rooms --
Where tired Children placid sleep
Thro' Centuries of noon
This place is Bliss -- this town is Heaven --
Please, Pater, pretty soon!
"Oh could we climb where Moses stood,
And view the Landscape o'er"
Not Father's bells -- nor Factories,
Could scare us any more!
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